Here’s what happens when private equity buys homes in your neighborhood

Daniel Erb became a corporate landlord kind of by accident. It started in 2020, when he received his first bonus as an investment banker. It was more money than he was used to. He wanted to invest in real estate, so he called his cousin, a research analyst at BlackRock, for advice.

As they talked over options, his cousin showed him a striking chart of the number of “housing starts” in the U.S. since 1950 (basically the number of new houses and apartments built each year). It showed that the last 10 years had the fewest starts since the 1960s, even though the U.S. population was now much larger.

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It was a full decade of underinvestment. They focused on single-family homes — the classic house with a yard, often in the suburbs.

“I’m a millennial,” says Erb. “I’ve always envisioned